


Two Hours and Eleven Minutes After Midnight

by LandofWordsandNonsense (RiaHawk)



Series: Prompted One Shots [3]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Caleb is stubborn, Caleb's a mess, Gen, Insomnia, Introspection, insomnia is really a bitch, not quite cuddlepile, the Nein take care of him, there comes a point when even if you're brilliant you simply can't process things any more
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-04
Updated: 2018-10-04
Packaged: 2019-07-25 00:49:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16186625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RiaHawk/pseuds/LandofWordsandNonsense
Summary: He wants to sleep. He desperately wants to sleep.Caleb has not slept in six days, nineteen hours, and thirty four minutes.





	Two Hours and Eleven Minutes After Midnight

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Insomnia

It is exactly two hours and eleven minutes after midnight.

 

At this time of year, the sun will rise in exactly five hours and seventeen minutes, and they will rise and break camp and continue on their way.

 

They would not let him take a watch tonight, so he has been laying in his bedroll for exactly three hours and fifty-eight minutes.

 

Caleb has not slept in six days, nineteen hours, and thirty four minutes.

 

He has not been able to hide this from Nott since the morning of the second day.

 

He wants to sleep. He  _ desperately _ wants to sleep. He hurts. Everything  _ hurts _ . His head pounds with the tension he cannot shed. His neck, his back, his arms, his legs ache in a dull, persistent way that no amount of tea or linament or healing cantrips will stop, and is gradually and steadily increasing. His fingers and the soles of his feet hurt more sharply, like a cramp he cannot stretch out, so tight he wants to cry with it. Even his beard and his hair hurt and it's hard to keep himself from whimpering when Nott tries to stroke his hair in an effort to soothe him. He feels nauseous, and cannot manage any food. He did not even attempt breakfast, and has had only water since. The water makes him nauseous too.

 

He has not been able to hide this from Fjord since the afternoon of the fourth day.

 

His mind is paradoxically slow and speeding out of control at the same time. It takes all of his concentration to track conversations, and even then, it takes more energy than he has to respond appropriately. He is sure his speech is slurred and often verges into incoherency. He cannot plan, he cannot judge the sensibility of the plans the others make, he can hardly remember the plans once they are made. He walks through the world in a fog, stumbling and tripping and dizzy, and it is now taking him so long to react to the things that happen around him that he has passed from merely being useless should they be attacked to an active danger. His head is so full of cotton wool that the only spell he can properly manage is Fire Bolt, the one burned into his subconscious and muscle memory. He has cast that in his sleep before, which right now is an irony he cannot process or appreciate. This is fortunate because if he could, he would either rage or weep. Many things make him wish to either rage or weep, or both at the same time, and it is becoming more and more difficult to prevent himself from doing so, even though they are objectively small things barely worthy of notice. He is barely holding together by a thread, and that thread is fraying more and more each moment.

 

He has not been able to hide this from Beau since the middle of the fifth day.

 

He cannot stop thinking, his anxiety spinning possible disasters, each more flagrant and improbably than the last but he cannot tell himself how flagrant and improbable they are because they all seem so reasonable right now. He cannot stop replaying every mistake he has made, no matter how slight, and dwelling all of the ways he could have avoided it. The only mercy is that with the combined press of weight of the slight mistakes, there is no room left for the terrible one that is on his mind most of the time. But he is suffocating under it all the same. He cannot stop dwelling on the fact that he cannot do this one simple _fucking_ thing, and that he is inconveniencing and burdening the others dreadfully. He is making the rest of the group (the group has a _name_ , what is their _fucking_ _name_ ) put themselves out to take care of a fully grown adult man who cannot manage to do such a simple thing as _go to sleep_.

 

He has not been able to hide this from Jester or Mollymauk since the sixth dawn.

 

He has been hallucinating for some time, how long he does not know, because he cannot always distinguish between them and what is real. Sometimes they are marvellous grotesqueries that have never existed on this plane or any other. Those are easy to dismiss. Sometimes it is people from his childhood, Astrid and Eodwulf and his parents and Trent, and those threaten to send his panic spiraling further out of control or make him break down in tears. Those are much harder to dismiss, and only by clinging to Nott like a drowning man can he keep himself from complete hysteria. The worst ones though, are the momentary glimpses he sees of brigands or Crownsguard or gnolls lurking in the brush along the road or just outside of their camp, because he cannot tell if that is merely another hallucination or if it is an actual ambush and lives are at stake if he is wrong.

 

He has been on the verge of a devastating panic attack for entirely too long.

 

He has tried everything he can think of. He tried reciting books in his head until he could no longer remember the words. He tried counting stars until they all blurred together. He tried listening to the campfire and the noises of the night until he thought he might go mad from the clamor. He tried stopping his ears until the silence became deafening. He tried tea and incense until they ran out of both. He would have tried Frumpkin but Frumpkin had been snapped back to the Feywild for his own safety and now Caleb could not fucking remember how to  _ reach _ him to snap him back.

 

There  _ is _ an irony he can process right now and it makes him want to laugh until he sobs or sob until he laughs. And that is that of  _ all  _ of them,  _ he _ is the only one capable of casting Sleep... if he had not run out of available spells days ago, or could manage to remember the words or the hand movements or what the material components were.

 

He rolls over in his bedroll onto his back, whimpering as the omnipresent, reasonless pain shoots through his left side at the movement, and his eyes starting with tears of sheer frustration. He sees a vague blue blur near the fire, and thinks it is Jester, unless he's seeing things again. Then there is another movement nearby, and it takes him so long to notice it that Nott is already carefully curled up in a small, compact weight on his chest by the time he knows she had even shifted.  He hears Fjord say something quietly but cannot process what it is, and Beau responds in an uncharacteristically low tone. Then there's a faint jingle of jewelry next to him, and Mollymauk carefully moves up to his side. That he's able to track because Mollymauk is careful to move slowly and give him time to get used to it.

 

" _ Mr. Caleb _ ," he says gently and persuasively in what Caleb's exhausted mind cannot identify as Infernal, but the magic reaches him just the same, and it slips through the cracks so easily that he never has a chance to notice it. " _ Can you try to relax as much as you can for me? Can you let us try to help you now? _ "

 

And because Mollymauk is his friend and he is not asking so much, he gives a tiny nod, tears already running down his face. Mollymauk shifts a bit closer, close enough that Caleb can feel the rumbling purr in the tiefling's chest, but not so close that Caleb feels trapped. Between the purring and Nott's grounding weight on his chest, it's almost as good as Frumpkin, and it helps to quiet his mind and release the tight coil of panic brewing inside of him a bit. Then Jester moves, settling near his head, and brushes his face with a gentleness he certainly does not deserve but is too ground down to protest, and a warm wave of magic soothes away the aches and tension, and he is able to relax a little more like Mollymauk asked him to.

 

Then there's music, a soft lullaby in a language he doesn't recognize right now, and it takes him a moment to realize that Jester is singing behind him. A moment later, a surprising warm baritone joins in, not harmonizing quite perfectly but it's nice all the same, and Fjord is near his feet, close enough to be in reach but not touching him and it's so nice that Caleb could nearly weep with it.

 

And it's getting hard to keep his eyes open, but they're still out in the middle of nowhere, he knows that much, it's not  _ safe _ to have everyone clustered around like this, and he was supposed to do something to help with that but he can't remember what. But he can just see Beau on the other side of the fire, moving back and forth and her attention on everything around them but him, and after some moments, he can put the pieces together enough to realize she's on guard.

 

And for reasons he would not consciously be able to explain the next day if he even remembered it, it's enough. His mind finally, blessedly, goes silent and he relaxes.

 

Caleb sleeps.

**Author's Note:**

> Fun fact, I'm prone to insomnia myself, and all of Caleb's symptoms are based on my own, though he suffered through it a lot longer than I ever did.


End file.
